Apple announced the new iPhone 3G S this week, and it seems that most of the talk surrounding the latest Apple trophy is concentrated on AT&T inexplicably disabling the tether capable iPhone to prevent consumers from tethering a laptop to the iPhone for purposes of connecting to the Internet. Having used an AT&T Tilt prior to purchasing my iPhone 3G last summer, I am familiar with the concept of tethering and had tethered my laptop to my Tilt on a few emergency occasions when I needed to take care of work when no WiFi was to be found. Today, in perusing my RSS feeds, I came across a great question posed by Louis Gray: What Makes More Sense: iPhone Tethering or a Wireless Card? I read through his article and thought that it was well written and an intelligent question to which I had a better answer than either of his choices.
Prior to the iPhone announcment, there was a little talk of a new Verizon (and Sprint) product call the Novatel MiFi. The MiFi is a portable wireless router that lets you have a WiFi cloud connected to the Internet with you whereever you go. Sheer genius the minds that developed this unit! A wireless card is tied to a laptop, but the MiFi can supply Internet connectivity to mulitple devices that travel with you, and while a wireless card will drain your laptop battery, the MiFi has its own rechargeable battery. I think that this is where the future of communication is headed -- you will travel with your own Internet cloud. An Internet connected iPhone is an amazing tool -- there is no denying that. Tethering is just the tip of the iceberg of what a great tool it could become.
So, while Louis asks, "iPhone tethering or a wireless card?", I say , "make the next generation iPhone work like a MiFi and share its Internet connection with other devices." The iPhone has become such a hub for my connectivity purposes, I could think of no better way to make it more useful to me. When I travel, I always have my iPhone with me, and usually, my laptop. I rarely use my laptop, but keep it with me in the event that something happens back at the office and I have to use a full size interface to resolve an issue. As I said, tethering works for the purpose, but is clumsy at best (even for tech savvy people). A device like the MiFi makes connecting simple, but it's another device to carry and another subscription to pay. Listen up AT&T: to make people want it, you have to add an additional tariff tier to the iPhone data plans, for those who want to access data from other devices in addition to on the iPhone. Reduce the cost of the iPhone data plan, which is ridiculous at $30 a month, to $20 a month and then add an additional $30 for MiFi like access. That will attract customers and not alienate them as the company has been doing recently.
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